The Ivy Lie

A pre-med wrote to me with some questions, which I’ve listed in bold, followed by my responses. I hope that this conveys some of the parental pressure and fatigue that is often experienced by students in intense majors.

“I can’t tell you how many times others would simply wave off my concerns and give me trite advice such as “no pain, no gain”, and “suck it up, you’re an adult now”.”

That pretty much echoes the feedback that I got as well, from my dad, my profs, and my advisors. I remember once when a student complained to the organic chemistry professor that the exams were obscenely difficult and his grades were jeopardizing his chances of getting into med school. The professor’s response was, “Well, the world needs ditch diggers too.”

“I’m lucky because I have parental support for my college education (so I’ll be graduating debt free), and also fortunate to have a good amount of financial savings on my own, so I can afford to take time off to travel.”

Awesome! You can at least be glad that your finances are stable. The most brutal stories seem to come from students who are in over their head with debt when they graduate… and then still can’t find work. I was somewhere in the middle – my parents covered my first two years at Duke, and I paid for the remaining two with a trust fund from my grandparents, which at the time had about $100K in it (suffice it to say, I spent the entirety of it on college). So I also graduated debt-free, but I was left with no savings, so when I couldn’t find work after graduating, I was forced to move out of North Carolina and into my mother’s basement on the other side of the country.

“…medicine is a career that requires extreme dedication and a huge amount of altruism, and seeing how I fared after being subjected to boot-camp like conditions for two years makes me realize that this career isn’t right for me.”

That’s always been my impression as well. When I was at Duke, I shadowed a cardiologist (a Harvard alum) specializing in angioplasty, and what shocked me the most was that the “standard” educational track for his specialty didn’t end until about age 36 because there was so much required training. As I recall, in addition the 4 years of college and 4 years of med school, he had to do a 1-year general medicine internship, 4 years of internal medicine residency, 4 years of cardiology specialization, and then a year of hands-on training in angioplasty. Aside from the sacrifice of time, both med school and the residencies sounded brutal: 100+ hour weeks for years on end, having to sleep in the hospital, rarely getting to go home, being paid a pittance as an intern after forking over a quarter million dollars for the MD degree, and having no free time or life at all outside of medicine.

“While we are on the topic of career change, would you mind sharing with me how and why you decided to go into computer science?”

It was a mix of personal interest, pragmatism, and a bit of blind luck. I dabbled with web design as far back as 7th grade, but didn’t really learn to program properly at the time. In 2008, after quitting my last biology research job, I took a trip to Seattle and happened to bump into a couple of classmates from Duke, one of whom was working at Microsoft, and the other was applying for an internship program there. Chatting with them rekindled my interest in web development and I actually had hoped to get into the same internship program as well the following year (the application deadline had passed for that year). Unfortunately, the program got canceled in 2009 in the wake of the economic downturn and Microsoft’s first-ever round of layoffs, and to my knowledge they never brought it back. I applied for some other software jobs in the meantime, but it became clear that I would need a CS degree to get my foot in the door, so eventually I went back to school. To be honest, as much as I like programming, working in the industry can be pretty frustrating, especially on large projects (poor planning and communication and enormous technical complexity being the main culprits), but there are a lot of jobs available, they generally pay well, and there’s no shortage of challenges and opportunities to learn something new.

“My parents are still strongly urging me to continue on and that all my suffering will be “all worth it in the end”… My unconventional decision to take time off and possibly not go through with medicine has severely strained my relationship with my parents, and its difficult too to deal with this on a daily basis. Have you had any experience dealing with this?”

Very much so, actually. My father was the quintessential “helicopter parent” who planned out my education from a young age and then monitored my performance closely. When I started to get burned out, I began doubting whether I should continue pursuing medicine. In response, my dad gave me the same line as your parents did, that “it will all be worth it in the end” and that I needed to “stop fighting it” and trust him because he knew better. He had me convinced that no other career was realistic, and that I would probably be a failure if I didn’t follow through with becoming a doctor. When I eventually put my foot down and made it clear that I wasn’t going to apply to med school and that I would never be a doctor, he suddenly became aloof, lost all interest in my life, and stopped offering financial support. It was so infuriating that I severed all ties with him, and it was only a few weeks ago that I spoke to him again for the first time in five years. The pressures of my education sparked conflict between my parents as well. My mom, being a state school grad, was opposed to spending so much money on a private education, and took the stance that my dad was too controlling and that I needed a life outside of my schoolwork. My father disagreed, and they had a lot of heated arguments about it. During my freshman year of college, they got divorced.

All I can say is that you have to follow your own dreams. Don’t worry about straining your relationship with your parents; I’m sure they have your best interests at heart, but at some point, they have an obligation to let you act independently and make your own decisions. If you wear yourself out trying to please them, your relationship with them with them may end up even more strained than if you disobey their wishes now and do what you think is right. A few of my friends have asked me over the years why I didn’t rebel. The truth is, I always tried to be a “good kid” and I respected my dad’s input, but in hindsight, I did so to an unhealthy degree and it was ultimately detrimental to me and to my relationship with my father.

As much as parents “want the best” for their children, they are also prone to being selfish, controlling and overprotective, and they don’t necessarily know more (or better) than you do when it comes to your education and career. You should certainly consider their advice, but if they’re worried that you won’t have other professional options, all I can say is it just isn’t true. I think a lot of my father’s paranoia about me ending up in a menial job was the result of ignorance about the current job market, since he had a steady career as a lawyer in a private practice and hadn’t had to apply for a job in over twenty years. In addition, it’s easy for parents to put pressure on their children when they (the parents) aren’t experiencing the stress of the workload first-hand. For the same reason, they may not understand why you’re feeling frustrated or burned out, and it may be difficult for them to know if they’re pushing you too hard. It may not even be possible for them to comprehend what the experience is really like from your perspective. But the reality is that you have to look after yourself first and foremost, and as long as you make sensible and responsible choices, your parents have no business being disappointed. If you follow your gut, I think you’ll thank yourself in the long run, and if you’re lucky, your parents may respect you more for it in the end.